Carmen Graciela Díaz's Blog

The World Cities Culture Forum (WCCF), a coalition of 35 global cities, recently announced it will bring together cultural leaders from nine cities to take part in its first Leadership Exchange Programme. Together, they will collaborate and develop creative solutions to urban challenges, from climate change and threats to affordability to community engagement, establishing the role arts and culture serve in advancing cities and shaping public policy.

The Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census has raised concerns that it would prevent accurate recording and discourage noncitizens, especially immigrants without legal status, from participating. As The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported recently, grantmakers are raising concerns that the White House plan could distort the results of this population count.

"What was the original goal of the arts education policy and advocacy grantmaking work?" That is one of the questions the education and policy firm, Education First, tackled after the Hewlett Foundation commissioned an evaluation of its arts education grantmaking over the past decade.

The Open Society Foundations recently awarded the first recipients of the Soros Arts Fellowship, an initiative to support artists confronting threats to open society through the use of public space. The eight fellows, from seven different countries, will each receive $80,000 to work on a socially engaged art project over the next 18 months.

The newly released report Racial Equity and Arts Funding in Greater Pittsburgh is "an effort to uncover the facts of how arts funding has been and is distributed by race," according to Mitch Swain, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council (GPAC) CEO.

The deep conversations on race and some of the written pieces the movie Black Panther has inspired set the stage for an article in Hyperallergic that explores why cultural critics of color can help elevate and amplify significant cultural debates to better understand them or, at least, discover them through a different light.

Response/ABILITY, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council (GPAC) annual convening, will center conversations on funding trends, equity issues, and how to meet the challenges currently facing the arts.

In Chicago, at last month's PolicyLink Equity Summit, a tour of the city focused on how local journalism provides a voice to the equity agenda. In a recent piece, Nonprofit Quarterly highlights some examples that showcase the importance of investing in journalism and the power news stories have to advance conversations about and actions toward.

In partnership with 15 Massachusetts arts organizations, the Barr Foundation has announced a $30 million, six-year initiative to amplify the organizations’ leadership to nurture more culturally vibrant communities.

In times when the conversation on how rent increases impact artists and communities' ties with their history, a post by the Northern California Grantmakers discusses how the Kenneth Rainin Foundation has tackled the question of how to make more of its dollars to assist organizations stay put as rents rise across the Bay Area.